School’s Out, Green’s In

Staring down a long summer with the kids? Along with hitting the road for family picnics, trips to the fair and visits to grandma, here are 10 green—and fun!—things you can do with your children this summer.

Amuse your pre-schoolers

1. Do a sock walk. Pull on a pair of thick wooly socks over your child’s shoes and head for a nature walk through a field or forest. “When you get home, take the socks off and look closely at all the seeds,” says Jed Goldberg, president of Earth Day Canada. “Kids can try and identify them. Or they can put the sock in a pan of water in the sun and watch them sprout and grow.”  

2. Get crafty. Don’t toss valuable egg cartons, toilet rolls and pie plates into the recycling bin. Stash some pieces in a craft box or cupboard for rainy day craft creativity. For some great ideas on how to “upcycle” these everyday materials with the kids, click here.

3. Make like Snow White. Lure birds and other wildlife to your yard by fashioning bird and butterfly feeders out of 2-litre pop bottles or milk cartons.

4. Plant a garden. But not just any garden. How about creating a butterfly garden, filled with Black-Eyed Susans, New England aster and Wild Bergamot, the kinds of flora to attract winged friends? Or a “Pizza Garden,” suggests Goldberg, in which “you plant all the herbs that you would use on a pizza—oregano, parsley and basil.”

Excite your school-agers

5. Become a foodie. To learn where our food comes from, visit pick-your-own farms to pick strawberries, raspberries and other yummy produce. Or look up an organic farm near where you live and see if they offer tours. “It’s part of having kids understand where food comes from—where it’s grown and why local food is important,” says Goldberg. Search the Canadian Organic Growers by local chapter.

6. Keep a species diary. “Help your kids keep a diary of wildlife they see each day,” says Tara Wood, manager of public relations for the World Wildlife Fund-Canada. ‘You can get your kids books to help identify species, a pair of binoculars and so forth.” Eagle-eyed types can try and determine whether it’s the same animal returning time and again by identifying key distinctions, or whether it’s new visitors every time.

7. Channel Jacques Cartier…and turn them into explorers. Challenge kids to play I Spy in the woods by giving them a list of things to find that are: soft, rough, smooth, cold, dry, slimy, heavy, hot, squishy or wet. Or blindfold them in a small area. “Have them go up to a tree and touch it, smell it and feel it,” says Goldberg. “Then walk them back to the starting point, spin them around and take the blindfolds off. Then they have to go back and find their tree.”

Tempt your teens

8. Make seed paper. Lindsay Coulter, the Queen of Green, suggests making this plantable paper out of recycled materials and seeds that bloom into flowers and flora.

9. Get an in-house audit. By examining the contents of the household garbage, kids can conduct a garbage audit, complete with suggestions on how to cut down on household waste. Or, they can do a home energy audit by analyzing things such as light use, drafty areas and more.

10. Plan—and plant—a fall harvest. “Many people don’t realize you can get another crop basically by planting peas and greens such as bok choy, spinach, lettuce by mid-August,” says Sunday Harrison, director of the not-for-profit Green Thumbs Growing Kids.